Sometimes the people who change our lives aren't the ones who stay. Sometimes they are the ones who cross our path, leave, and unknowingly become part of a transformation we don't recognise until years later.
Today I had one of those chance encounters.
Someone I hadn't seen for around eight years. And while our conversation was brief, and we each went our separate ways again, I was left with something I hadn't really thought about before.
How someone can play such a significant part in your journey of transformation, even when your lives take two completely different paths.
And the funny thing is, our friendship didn't even begin in the usual way.
It All Started With a Cookbook Club
Over ten years ago, I put out an advertisement looking for women who might like to join a cookbook club.
The idea was simple. A group of women coming together, sharing our love of cooking, trying recipes and enjoying a meal together. Three women responded and here's the funny part. When I think about it now, I don't believe we ever actually hosted our first cookbook club meal!
Yet, more than ten years later, I still have contact with all three women.
Not necessarily frequent contact. We aren't part of each other's everyday lives. We are at different stages, in different places, with different interests and experiences, apart from cooking, of course. But there is something quite beautiful about these friendships.
The kind where you can go months, even years, without seeing one another, yet know that at any given moment there is still a connection.
In some ways, more so than friendships where you've spent years in each other's company.
It has made me think about how we measure friendship. Is it really about how often we see someone? How much time we spend together? Or is there something deeper in the connections we make along the way?
The Friendship That Came and Went
One of these women and I really hit it off. While our cookbook club never took off, our friendship certainly did. We became quite close, catching up regularly, sharing our love for health and wellbeing and, of course, our shrine walls of practically every cookbook imaginable!
We had so much to talk about.
And then, one day, things changed.
What had been regular contact became almost nonexistent. To this day, I don't really know what happened. I don't know if there was a particular moment, something I said, something she was going through, or whether life simply took us in different directions.
I remember wrestling with it internally for quite some time.
Had I done something wrong?
Was there something I had missed?
I think so often when relationships change, particularly without explanation, we turn inward and begin questioning ourselves.
And as I write this now, I realise just how differently I see these things today.
There is more compassion. More curiosity.
More understanding that people have their own lives, experiences, struggles and reasons for the choices they make. Reasons we may never know or fully understand and perhaps we don't always need to.
Perhaps we can learn to appreciate a friendship for what it was, receive the moments as they come, without an agenda or expectation of what they should become.
Wow.
I'm actually sitting here mentally tapping myself on the shoulder as I type this, because I can see my own growth in those words.
The person I was back then would have struggled to arrive at that understanding without first going through so much self-questioning.
Here I am, recognising it as I write, but that's a reflection for another blog! Because there is something else about this friendship that I want to share.
The Encounter That Changed My Walk
Years passed. We hadn't seen one another for a long time when, completely out of the blue, she came around to visit me at another house we were living in. During our conversation, she shared something that took me by surprise.
She had become involved in church life.
And she had been baptised.
Now, you might think that as someone who was actively attending church myself, I would have been delighted.
And I was happy for her, but what happened internally was something quite different.
I felt an immediate sense of shame and guilt.
Why hadn't I shared my faith with her?
Here I was, someone who had been involved in church for years, and I had never really spoken to her about it and now she had gone from not being involved in church to becoming an active attendee and being baptised.
For a moment, I felt as though I had failed in some way, but almost as quickly as that feeling arrived, something else followed.
A question.
And that question would change my whole walk.
The Question I Had Been Avoiding
I began thinking about why I hadn't shared my church with her and then I realised something.
Given the opportunity, I wouldn't have wanted to.
In fact, I probably would have cringed at the thought of inviting her. Not because I didn't want her to know God, quite the opposite.
Because deep down, I didn't believe the environment I was attending was a safe one for her.
I remember thinking something along the lines of:
No way. You're better off staying away from this.
And then came the question.
Well, if I feel that way about this environment, why am I still going there myself?
That question stopped me, because the truth was, I had known for a long time that something wasn't right.
I had felt it.
There had been discomfort, conflict and moments where things simply didn't sit well within me.
Yet I continued.
Why?
Because sometimes the very environments we find ourselves in can leave us believing that it is either this or nothing.
When faith is involved, that can become even more complicated. For so long, I had wrestled with the idea that leaving that church would somehow mean I was turning my back on God.
That stepping away from the environment meant stepping away from Him.
But what I eventually came to understand was quite the opposite.
Leaving that environment wasn't turning my back on God. It became part of finding my way closer to Him.
I had been so caught up in what I believed I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to belong and what faith was supposed to look like, that I had stopped giving myself permission to question what I was actually experiencing.
And all it took was one conversation.
One unexpected visit.
One person sharing something about her own journey.
She had no idea that in telling me about her encounter with faith, she was creating the space for me to recognise something within my own.
Her encounter led to my own encounter.
Sometimes We Don't Recognise the Significance Until Years Later
That brings me back to today, seeing her again, after all these years.
Our conversation was brief. A little awkward, even.
Not every friendship is one where you can pick up exactly where you left off, regardless of how many miles or years have passed.
And that's okay too. I didn't even get the chance to ask whether she still attends church. I would have loved to know.
But more than that, I would love to see her again, if only to tell her something she probably has no idea about.
That her encounter became my encounter.
That a conversation she may not even remember became a significant moment in my own transformation.
That today, my walk with God feels more aligned than ever.
Not because I have all the answers.
Not because I have arrived at some destination.
But because I have learned to make space for curiosity, compassion and discernment rather than allowing shame, guilt or expectation to make my choices for me.
That Small Voice Within
Interestingly, I came across an image today talking about quantum entanglement and the idea that perhaps there is more to our connections and the pathways before us than we fully understand. It suggested that what we sometimes describe as gut feelings might be connected to something beyond our immediate awareness.
And it got me thinking.
How often do we experience that small sensation within?
That moment of discomfort.
That quiet knowing.
That feeling that something doesn't quite align, even when everything around us is telling us that it should.
And how often do we dismiss it?
Explain it away?
Override it because of what we think we should do, what others expect of us, or what we have been taught to believe?
I know I did.
For years.
And this is one of the reasons I love the work I do today with somatics.
Not because the body somehow knows everything or because every sensation is a message we must act upon, but because our bodies are part of how we experience and respond to the world.
They can hold patterns of protection, learned responses, emotions and experiences that we haven't necessarily stopped to become curious about.
And when we begin to reconnect with those responses, rather than immediately reacting to them or trying to make them disappear, something begins to change.
We create space.
Space to notice.
Space to become curious.
Space to recognise whether we are responding from fear, expectation, an old pattern or something that genuinely matters to us.
And within that pause, we begin to discover that we have a choice.
For me, this is where awareness, compassion and discernment come together.
It's not about learning to trust every feeling without question.
It's about learning to listen without immediately judging, dismissing or obeying what we experience.
To sit with it.
To explore it.
And to make choices that are more aligned with who we are becoming.
The Transformation We Don't Always See Happening
Looking back, I can see that the conversation with my friend created one of those pauses.
I felt the shame.
I noticed the guilt.
But then something within me questioned the very belief that was creating it. Iinstead of simply accepting that I had somehow failed because I hadn't invited her to church, I became curious about why I hadn't wanted to.
That curiosity opened a door, one that I may not have walked through otherwise, or at least not at that moment.
And now, years later, I can look back with compassion for the person I was then.
The one who was trying to do the right thing.
The one who was afraid that questioning an environment might mean questioning her faith.
The one who had learned to override her own discomfort because she believed she was supposed to stay.
And I can appreciate the journey that followed.
Not every step was easy.
Not every decision came with certainty.
But there was growth.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of transformation is that sometimes we don't even recognise it until we find ourselves responding differently to something that once would have consumed us.
Like the way I now reflect on a friendship that changed without explanation, or the way I can look at my faith journey without the same shame and guilt that once surrounded it.
I don't need to know why our friendship changed.
I don't need to make our encounter mean something to her that it may not have meant.
I can simply appreciate that she was part of my journey.
Perhaps There Are No Small Encounters
I often think we place so much emphasis on the relationships that stay, the people who walk alongside us for years, that we sometimes overlook the significance of those who are only present for a season.
Some people walk beside us.
Some walk ahead.
Some take an entirely different path.
And some, without ever knowing it, become part of the very moments that change our direction.
Today reminded me of that.
A cookbook club that never actually became a cookbook club.
A friendship that blossomed and then quietly disappeared.
A visit years later that stirred shame, guilt and then one life-changing question.
Another chance encounter, eight years on, that allowed me to see just how far my journey has taken me.
I don't know whether our paths will cross again.
I hope they do.
But if they don't, that's okay too.
Because perhaps the gift wasn't in how long the friendship lasted or whether we would ever return to what it once was.
We may never know the part we have played in someone else's journey.
Just as they may never know the part they have played in ours.
And as I sit here reflecting, I am reminded of something else, all those years ago,
I had a pause.
I became curious.
And I made a choice.
Today, I can see the growth that came from it.
And I am grateful for a chance encounter that, in ways neither of us could have imagined, became part of my journey back to myself and closer to God.
Sometimes an encounter isn't about the person who crosses our path. It's about what their presence helps us recognise within ourselves.
